The Priest Inside Anthropic’s A.I.

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The Priest Inside Anthropic’s A.I.

Father Brendan McGuire left the tech industry to serve God. Now he's back—helping Anthropic build something resembling a conscience.

Father Brendan McGuire is writing a novel about a disenchanted monk and his A.I. companion. He’s doing it with Claude. That detail—a Catholic priest using Anthropic’s chatbot to explore questions of faith and artificial consciousness—tells you something about where Silicon Valley’s moral reckoning has arrived. McGuire, 60, leads St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, Calif., a congregation that counts some of the Valley’s A.I. researchers among its members. Earlier this year, he helped Anthropic shape the Claude Constitution, the set of guiding principles governing how its A.I. behaves.

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He is not, in other words, an outside critic. He is something more........

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